OpenStack for Non-Developers

Building and running a production-level cloud is a lot of hard work and can be a full-time job for dozens of people. However running a small, non-production cloud for personal or workgroup use is far less work and can yield many of the benefits of using a third party cloud service at a fraction of the cost. Most Linux distributions contain packages for a recent official OpenStack release, and this unburdens system administrators from having to deal with the vagaries of DevStack or building and installing from source. Building an OpenStack cloud service is now no longer the domain of the people who wrote the code.

This talk describes techniques, tips and tricks for building and operating a private OpenStack cloud using the StackForge chef cookbooks in the comfort of your cubicle without having to make huge investments in time or hardware. Working with different levels of support or indifference in your organisation are discussed as well as how OpenStack can be introduced bottom-up as the fantastically useful tool that it is.

Tim Potter

Tim is a long-time systems and Unix programmer currently working for HP in Canberra, Australia. He was instrumental in creating and launching the world's largest OpenStack-based public cloud from a pile of machines in a research lab to something customers actually paid money to use.

Tim has made many contributions to various Open Source projects over the years, including Samba, Wireshark, OpenPegasus and SBLIM.